Women's Experience of Personal Power REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Introducti

This thesis examines women's experience of personal power. The review of literature presented in this chapter of the thesis addresses three issues related to this examination. First, the review provides a rationale for the development of the study's general topic. Second, the chapter presents a review of the existing research on the personal power of women in conflict resolution settings. Third, the chapter provides a discussion of how the thesis will contribute to the existing research.

This study's research question is, "How do women perceive and describe their experience of personal power?" The question was developed as an outgrowth of my experiences with conflict resolution both in the corporate world and in Antioch College's Conflict Resolution program. As the only person of color in both settings, I repeatedly observed that the field did not fully encourage either minorities or women to overcome their fears of stating their real feelings and opinions---a pivotal element of the experience and expression of personal power.

Rather than encouragement, what I found was that the structures inherent in the conflict resolution model, whether applied in a corporate or academic setting, incorporated an inherent imbalance of power with the mediator or facilitator assuming the dominant role and the disputants given a subordinate role. This dominate/subordinate structure itself can be a barrier to the development of self-reliance and

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its were maximized, and females preferred parity outcomes. This difference was assumed to reflect a gender difference in underlying goals. It was also found that females tended to prefer mediation to face-to-face bargaining; whereas, males tended to prefer face-to-face bargaining to mediation. Arbitration was least preferred by both males and females. A third study was conducted to determine whether the different bargaining settings were seen as relating to the attainment of different goals. In this study, males and females perceived parity outcomes as most likely to occur in mediation and arbitration. Face-to-face bargaining was viewed as the setting in which it would be most likely to maximize one's profit. There were no gender differences in these perceptions. Based on the findings of the three studies it was concluded that females prefer parity outcomes and a bargaining setting (mediation) more than do males. Males prefer outcomes which maximize their own profits and the bargaining setting (face-to-face bargaining) that both sexes agree is likely to lead to the attainment of that goal more than do females. It was also concluded that goals for a negotiation session influence preference for various conflict resolution sett

Category: Psychology - W